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"So we have a few great Free Software gaming engines now, like DarkPlaces used in Nexuiz, Cube 2 used in Sauerbraten, Qfusion used in Warsow, soon id Tech 4 which is used in id Software's Quake 4, Doom 3, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars along with many others, and the HPL1 engine used in Frictional Games' "Penumbra: Overture". All of these engines have some combination of normal mapping, bump mapping, and/or parallax mapping..."

While there are many open-source games available (just see the recent discussion about the most advanced GPL-ed FPS), most of them are based upon the ioquake3 game engine that in turn is based upon id Software's open-source id Tech 3 engine. There's also games like Nexuiz that use the DarkPlaces engine and then also Warsow that uses QFusion.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the long-awaited title by id Software and Splash Damage, launched today in North America. While a Linux-native client of this game isn't available today, it will be available shortly.

Quake Live is a First Person Shooter game, very similar to many other Quake-based variants, an extremely popular and successful franchise of games developed by id Software. In fact, many Linux First Person Shooters are based on a variety of game engines, released as open-source by the company.

There have been many free software first-person shooters (FPS) projects over the years, from modded Doom and Quake engines to enhance the existing games (ezQuake, EGL, ZDoom), to free art packs such as OpenQuartz or OpenArena.

We've covered mind-mapping software at OStatic before, and here's another open source option to add to the list. Freeplane is a new mind mapping application forked from FreeMind and already sports some features that the project it's based on doesn't.

This article is part of the first-person shooter games reviews I'm putting up. Until now I talked about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, ioQuake3, UT2004, Nexuiz and OpenArena. I will dedicate this edition entirely to Urban Terror, a great first-person shooter game which was initially developed as a Quake 3 mod and evolved into a powerful and fast standalone game.